Assigning tasks based on roles

When using the User service to create human-centric processes, it is often advantageous to assign tasks to individuals based on their role in the process. This strategy is more flexible than assigning tasks to a specific person because, typically, different people are involved in different instances of the process.

This Quick Start discusses the use of the LDAP service, which is part of Foundation. It also discusses the User service, which you can use if you have Process Management.

Typically, roles in processes correspond with roles in a company. You can leverage information in your LDAP server to assign tasks to users if the user records are organized according to the company’s organizational structure or if the records themselves contain organizational information.

For example, a company’s internal purchase-request process requires that a person’s manager approve the purchase request before the purchase is made. The role of manager is constant; however, the person who requests the purchase determines who the manager is. The user records in the corporate LDAP server include the identification of the user’s manager. The LDAP server can be queried to find out who that person’s manager is who submitted the purchase request.

The process diagram that implements this business process can use the LDAP Query operation of the LDAP service to query the LDAP server. After the identification of the manager is retrieved, the task for approving the purchase request can be assigned to that manager. The following illustration shows the part of the process diagram that performs the LDAP query and the task assignment.

executeLookup and  AssignTask operations

The following illustration describes the structure of the information in the LDAP server that the previously described example process uses.

The records with the distinct name (DN) in the format uid=username, ou=people, o=company_name contain information about individual company employees. The record includes the following attributes:

uid:
The unique identification of the user

manager:
The DN of the employee’s manager

Prerequisites

For assigning tasks based on roles, you are typically retrieving the identification of a user based on some other information (for example, job title, business unit to which the user belongs, or both.

Several pieces of information need to be available at design time or at run time to use the LDAP service to perform queries:

  • An understanding of how information is organized in the LDAP server. To perform the query, you need to specify a location in the LDAP schema to search.

  • Specific information and its relation to the sought-after information in the LDAP repository. This information is used to create a search filter that identifies the data to retrieve.

  • A string or list value that stores the retrieved information, depending on whether you are retrieving information for one or many LDAP records.

In our example process, the user identification of the person who requests the purchase is used in the query to find their manager.

Configuration

To configure an LDAP Query operation, you need to identify the area of the LDAP schema that you are searching, the type of LDAP object that you are searching, and the search filter to use.

The Query tab of the LDAP Query Options Editor is configured to search for the record that represents the user who submits the purchase request:

Base DN:
o=company_name (the topmost level in the directory.)

Search Context:
ou=people, o=company_name (The level in the directory that contains the records that are being searched.)

Search Filter:
(uid={$/process_data/@creator_id$}) (The example process is invoked when the person submits the purchase request, and the identification of the user is stored at the location /process_data/creator_id.)

Search Scope: ONE LEVEL (The records below the value for Search Context.)
The Output tab of the LDAP Query Options Editor is used to specify that the value of the manager attribute that the returned record contains is stored in a string variable named stringVar:
Value:
manager

Location:
stringVar

When the query is executed at run time, the stringVar variable contains the DN of the user’s manager, which is in the format uid=user id, ou=people, o=company_name. The task that the Assign Task operation generates needs to be assigned to the user that this DN represents.

The Select Initial User property of the Assign Task operation is assigned the user id part of the manager’s DN (the user identification). An XPath expression that resolves to the stringVar variable is used. The substring-after and substring-before functions are used to isolate the user id portion:

substring-after(substring-before(/process_data/@stringVar, ","),"uid=")

Other considerations

This Quick Start does not show the initiation step of the process. Also, this Quick Start focused on the LDAP Query operation. The LDAP service also provides the LDAP Query to XML operation that you can use to store query results in XML format.